“A lot of the subject matter is so out of date, some people look at them like they are watching Martian television. It’s from another planet.”

Ed Conroy

a collector of 16 mm

Every Friday night in his print shop on Niagara St., Stacey Case shows films that may be among the worst ever made and, therefore, the most entertaining to watch. They are 16 mm films — real, tangible, touchable, he says — that whir nostalgically from an old projector.

“Digital technology has wiped out something that was great for over 100 years,” Case says. “And that’s a shame.”

But film lovers like Case have become caretakers of the past, helping to keep the tradition alive.

It featured terrible scenes of workers toppling from scaffolding — much groaning from the audience — a wrench dropping on a worker’s face, bricks tumbling on a child playing with a wagon.

Next, a film warning children of the danger of strangers. “Some grown-ups see you,” the narrator says, “but most are too busy.” No subtle notes here: a red light pulses from a stranger’s face as little Bobby realizes his imminent peril.

It was followed by an oddly compelling film on the diving spider that dwells underwater.

You’ll understand why he calls his cinema Trash Palace. “It all comes back to the name,” he says. “I look on it as lowbrow entertainment.”

To find the Trash Palace, you enter the darkened carriageway of an old brick warehouse, pass through a courtyard, and go down a short set of stairs. It’s difficult to see exactly what is in the dimly lit room: lots of B-grade movie posters, a projection room filled with reels of film — some 60 features and 75 shorts. It’s also home to Case’s business, the Merch Guy, and the presses where he screen-prints posters, T-shirts and stickers for concerts — for bands such as Blue Rodeo and Queens of the Stone Age — are off to the side.

Chairs are neatly set up for about 30 or so. Dan Lovranski, who hosts a live audio wrestling show and is known as The Mouth, is the emcee for the night. The light from the projector, which Case bought from the Markham public library when it was getting rid of its 16 mm collection, is warm. The sound is familiar.

Though not to the teenagers in the front row. At school they see instructional films on television screens. “These films are corny and fun,” says Harlan Ferguson, 15.

At the back of the room is Greg Gulas, who works in adult literacy. “This place is like a nature preserve for bad and unloved films,” he observes. A group of IT co-workers in their 40s have gathered around a table; they say they can’t see films like these anywhere else.

“A lot of the subject matter is so out of date, some people look at them like they are watching Martian television,” says Ed Conroy, another collector of 16 mm, later on the phone. “It’s from another planet.”

Conroy has some 700 reels of educational films — some from the Scarborough public library collection — and a website, Retrontario.com, an archival project on YouTube and Twitter for “classic Ontario visual ephemera.”

“It’s the Stacey Cases of the world who are keeping film alive,” he adds.

Case, 41, and 6-foot-5 with tattoos of Mexican wrestlers on his forearms, knows music and film; he was a drummer in the Tijuana Bibles, a band he founded, and he also made movies, including Enter. . . Zombie King. It was, a reviewer noted, “a high-camp, low-budget mélange of masked wrestlers, hokey dialogue, spurting blood and gratuitous nudity.”

As a child Case was fascinated by his school’s audiovisual equipment. He has the look of a man from the 1950s, with short hair, heavy rimmed glasses and snap button shirts. Film is Case’s connection to his past, the culture of his parents’ generation.

Filmmakers loved using 16 mm — which was introduced in the 1920s for home movies — because the medium was portable. You didn’t need a studio, says Albert Ohayon, English curator for the National Film Board of Canada.

In recent decades, some well-received films were made in the 16 mm format — The Motorcycle Diaries (2004), Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels (1998), Leaving Las Vegas (1995).

Film lovers appreciate the texture and graininess of 16 mm, saying video images are too clean.

And 16 mm films are stable — much more so than video. If kept properly, they can last 200 or more years, Ohayon says.

The NFB stores one copy of its films — there are about 8,900 in 16 mm — as well as its negatives and makes digital transfers directly from negatives. “Part of the history of Canada is in our vaults and we can’t let that go to waste,” Ohayon says.

Case sees his mission similarly, preserving a different kind of social history while having a fun night at the movies, old style. “I don’t collect film for me. It’s always about the audience.”

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